1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to the delivery of content and context-sensitive advertisements, and more particularly to methods and systems for non-intrusive, media linked and embedded information delivery.
2. Related Art
Advertising generally refers to communications directed to sell products and services, or otherwise influence its recipients' behavior. To maximize exposure, wide-reaching, “traditional” media outlets such as print, radio, and television have been utilized to carry advertisements. These traditional forms of communication, particularly radio and television, capture the attention of the listener or viewer by presenting entertainment or informational content and interrupting that presentation at regular intervals to air commercial messages with the anticipation that the listener or viewer will remain fixated until the next segment. As a substitute for or as a supplement to conventional interruptive commercials, various advertisers' products are sometimes prominently placed in the presentation.
From early on in the history of broadcasting, advertising and content production have been intertwined, as broadcasters depended upon the revenue generated from the advertisements to subsidize production, and the advertisers depended on quality production to attract more viewers for increased sales. Listeners and viewers have benefited from this dynamic, as high-quality radio and television programming can be obtained for free. However, the listener or viewer largely remains a passive recipient of advertising and content, having little control over the same, perhaps except for changing channels and to turning the receiver on or off.
With increased computing power and network bandwidth, the global Internet is becoming a popular modality for delivering information and entertainment content. Typical consumer-oriented computer systems are capable of connecting to the Internet via cable, digital subscriber line (DSL), satellite, or telephone services, and have a web browser application installed thereon. With the indicated Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address, the web browser application communicated with the specified server to retrieve the specified document for display. Although the World Wide Web (the Web) was originally conceived for text-based data exchange, with feature advancements and external plug-in modules, a wide variety of multimedia content including video, audio, and images can be presented via the web browser application. Accordingly, consumers are no longer restricted to the aforementioned traditional media, and are regularly engaged with a combination of video, audio and text content over the Web.
The interactivity of the Web has not only appealed to consumers, but to advertisers as well, particularly because recipients essentially arrive at a website pre-selected for a specific commercial message. That is, the advertising can be targeted to a more precise degree because it was the consumer's interest in the subject matter of the website that resulted in a visit in the first place, in contrast to the more general approach associated with traditional media. One well-known advertisement system is Google AdSense, which incorporates advertisements on to a search engine results page based upon the user's search query.
Another common advertisement methodology involves the placement of banner advertisements on various parts of web pages interspersed with content. The banner advertisements include some combination of text and images, and is hyperlinked to the advertiser's own website where additional information is provided, or the advertised product or service can be purchased. Such banner advertisements may be made more intrusive by rendering them as pop-up advertisements, which are separate, smaller windows containing advertising that are overlaid on an existing window. Because the user must select a proximally located window control element to close it, the user is essentially forced to view the advertisement.
As noted above, the Internet is being increasingly utilized for delivering multimedia content such as videos and music. In order to support and fund video sharing sites, conventional context-sensitive advertising and banner advertisements may be employed. In some cases, the multimedia content is played back in a separate window of a dedicated playback software application. In other cases, the interface of the playback software application, including a portion where the multimedia content is replayed, is incorporated into the layout of an underlying webpage (e.g., YouTube). The sections of the webpage surrounding the playback interface typically incorporate advertisements that may or may not be contextually related to the multimedia content.
As is typically the case with all online advertisements, these banner advertisements are frequently ignored or overlooked at best, and at worst, the browser applications prevent them from being displayed in the first instance. Some measure of success has been achieved with these conventional online advertisement systems, however, as many websites generate substantial revenue therewith.
While acknowledging its limited successes, there still are numerous deficiencies associated with conventional online advertising approaches. One theory known in the art is attention economics, which proposes that the increased availability of information corresponds to a scarcity of attention with respect to the recipients of the information, that is, human attention is treated as a scarce commodity. Disregarding this, many advertisement modalities have been developed that attempt to gain more of the user's attention, while resulting in the attendant negative externalities or “noise” that burdens the user. The heavy emphasis on gaining the user's initial interest lies in the traditionally accepted advertising paradigm of Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA) that posits the “Attention” step as being the most critical, thus promoting the invasion of space.
In addition to those already mentioned, there are a variety of implementations of online advertising in connection with multimedia content delivery that follow the above-described paradigm. For example, the Compulsion.tv website that employed an interface in which each product placed into the video presentation was a clickable hyperlink therefor. Another example is the SeenOn.com website that includes a media player with product placement hotspotting, and a listing of all available items in the video presentation. Along these lines, the YouTube.com website employs a semi-transparent overlay that informs the user about product purchase opportunities that are related to the video presentations.
Some websites take even greater control over the delivery and presentation of multimedia content, forcing the user to view a short advertisement before starting playback. In some cases, the presentation is interrupted, again forcing the user to view another short advertisement. This is essentially reversion to traditional television broadcasting and advertisement, where the content producer and/or the broadcaster strictly controlled the presentation of advertisement and content. Significant consumer backlash may accompany such approaches, in that the associated brand may be perceived as being annoying, and related products may be deemed undesirable. Even in broadcast media where this approach has been accepted, tolerance for these tactics is decreasing, as manifested in the increasing popularity of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) and Video-On-Demand (VOD) services that allow commercial messages to be skipped or omitted entirely.
The traditional advertising model places a lot of importance on the advertiser rather than the user, as the advertiser had the power to determine when, where or how the advertisements would appear. Along these lines, content producers with the largest appeal or the most hits on the website attracted the most advertising dollars because the large appeal assures the most exposure for the money. As such, smaller advertisers can be precluded from advertising with large and popular media outlets even if the product being sold was a good fit for the audience. At the same time, smaller, lesser-known content producers that may have a narrower appeal can be precluded from entering into a substantial advertising agreement due to the perceived lack of an audience. The lack of funding may further result in production cancellations.
Due to the aforementioned deficiencies and more, there is a need in the art and for a more user-centric approach to advertising, specifically, non-intrusive media linked and embedded advertising.